The present invention relates generally to the field of online chat sessions, and more particularly to mood detection and response to promote effective communication in online chat sessions.
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is a communicative transaction that occurs over a network. CMC is divided into synchronous and asynchronous types.
Asynchronous computer-mediated communication (ACMC) refers to a type of communication where the communicators (often referred to herein as “users,” see Definitions, below) are not assumed to all be online, actively connected to the communication network, at the same time. Because not all users are online at the same time, in ACMC, successive communications are generally subject to significant time delays, with the time delays being caused by the hardware/software of the communication system and/or the manner in which users use the communication system. One familiar example of ACMC is e-mail communication systems.
Synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) refers to a type of communications where at least two of the communicators are online at the same time. One familiar example is a real-time online chat session (for example, an internet relay chat (IRC) chat session. One type of SCMC is chat-protocol-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (CPSCMC), which are based on protocols designed for the purpose of implementing real-time (see Definitions, below) chat sessions. In the art of SCMC, it is known a communicator will sometimes express her emotions to other communicator(s) through one or more of the following ways: (i) the substance of their writing (for example, use of the phrase “I wub u” to indicate love); (ii) the punctuation of their writing (for example, use of ALL CAPS text to indicate vexation); (iii) the formatting of their writing (for example, underlining to indicate urgency); and/or (iv) emoticons (for example, the characters “: 7 (” to indicate sadness through a sideways frowny face).
Some remarks to avoid confusion on terminology will now be set forth in this paragraph. The term of art “computer-mediated communication” (and SCMC and ACMC) should not be taken to imply any person or software necessarily plays the role of a “mediator” in the communications. Rather, in the art, “computer-mediated communication” is understood to be communications that are merely implemented by, and over, computer systems. In CMC (as in traditional face-to-face communications between humans) there certainly can be a person who plays the traditional role of a “mediator,” but this is not what the word “mediated” in the phrase “computer-mediated communication” means or implies. In other words CMC sessions don't necessarily, and usually do not, have any sort of entity that actively tries to get the relevant parties to come to any kind of agreement with respect to the subject matter of the CMC communications.
There currently exists software for determining (or at least attempting to determine) a writer's mood based on the writer's natural language writings. The input data is parsed and processed to select writing-related data relevant to the writer's mood. For example, some conventional text analytics engines include mood determination software.